


The One Where Dean Asks A Question

by Moorishflower



Series: A Cold Academic Hell [12]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-18
Updated: 2011-01-18
Packaged: 2017-10-14 21:46:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/153786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moorishflower/pseuds/Moorishflower
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not exactly a culmination - more like a start of something new. And Dean doesn't always do so well with new things, but he's willing to give this one a shot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The One Where Dean Asks A Question

  
The university’s coffee is the shittiest coffee that was ever brewed. This is not an opinion, it’s an objective fact that every single student on campus knows, and yet _every single one of them_ drinks the swill like nothing is wrong. Dean drinks it, too, but he’s not laboring under the misapprehension that his cup of tar and elephant shit is something that it’s not.

“God _damn_ , this is nasty,” he mutters, and then, almost as if in defiance of the coffee itself and everything it represents, he takes another sip. Sam laughs, swirling his Starbucks tall caramel macchiato with nonfat milk hold the whipped cream, please. Dean glares at Sam’s cup of coffee like it’s personally offended him. “I don’t understand how you can drink that crap this early in the morning.”

“You shouldn’t talk when you’re drinking your own flavor of crap.”

“At least this is _real_ coffee, not an ice cream sundae in a cup.”

Sam leans forward, raising his coffee and taking a defiant sip. Dean watches with thinly veiled disapproval. “ _So_. How are your classes going? It’s been a week.”

“A week of hell. Crowley’s gonna be the death of me, man, all I caught in Friday’s lecture was something about the Crusades and we’re all gonna die young and poor.”

“There was more to it than that.” Sam frowns, suddenly, and then reaches for his backpack. “I _think_.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t. But hey, at least we know how to answer every question on the midterm. ‘What is your future like?’ _Fucking awful_. Easy A.”

Sam laughs, abandoning his search for his religious studies notebook in favor of going back to his four-dollar heart attack in a cup. “You didn’t really answer the question.”

“Sure I did. First week was hell, man. First week of last semester was hell, first week of this semester was the same, and every first week after this is probably gonna be shitty, too.”

“You haven’t…said anything.”

Dean pauses. “What?”

“Normally you bitch about things when you’re pissed. Well, pissed about stuff that isn’t emotions-related.” Sam shrugs. “I haven’t heard you say a word. So, tell the truth. How was your first week?”

 _Shit_. “It was _fine_. Busy. Lot of syllabuses. Syllabi. Whatever. There was a lot of ‘getting to know you’ shit.”

“Did you get to know a certain psychology student?”

Dean freezes, and Sam nonchalantly raises his cup to his mouth and holds it there, not sipping, Dean _knows_ that, just…giving Dean time to collect his thoughts.

 _He’s going to find out eventually. And he’s going to disapprove, because that’s how Sam rolls, even if nothing ever comes of this weird thing between you and Castiel._

Dean rests his elbows on the table, leaning forward slightly.

 _But he doesn’t have to find out today._

“ _Maybe_ ,” he says, and Sam finally lowers his cup, grinning.

“Do I get to meet him?”

“Considering that our thing might not even be a _thing_ , I’m gonna go with no.”

“You met Jessica!”

“Yeah, after you’d already been dating for a month!”

“But you still met her.”

Dean shakes his head, laughing and exasperated. “Tell you what, Sam. If we start dating - _if_ \- then you’ll get to meet him.” Sam starts to grin, but is quickly stymied as Dean adds, “After a month.”

“You’re really gonna do that to me?”

“Sammy, this is the closest I’ve gotten to actually asking someone out since Lisa. I’m…” _Playing it safe._ But Dean doesn’t say that, not out loud, at least. He doesn’t want to sound…he doesn’t want Sam to think that the thing with Lisa broke him somehow. Doesn’t want him to think that the combination of that and how they were raised has ruined him for other people.

Even though that’s sometimes how he feels.

“Do…do you want to talk?” Dean levels Sam with a look, and Sam, after a moment, winces. “Yeah, yeah, I know, but…sometimes it’s nice to have a sounding board, you know?”

“I guess.” Dean sighs. “It’s just that this feels like it could be… _big_. Really big.”

“He’s that nice, huh?”

“He’s a lot of things. Nice is on there. Hot. Smart. Way too good for me.”

“Give yourself a little credit.”

“Even if I did, he’d _still_ be too good for me.”

“Yeah, then you’re doing it wrong.”

Dean snorts. “Point is, he’s gonna get sick of me. I’m gonna make one too many mistakes and he’ll realize that I’m…” _Completely socially inept outside of a bar or a pool hall. Not “long term relationship” material. Utterly unsuited for love._ “…not really his type.”

“How are you going to know if you don’t give him a shot?”

“You make it sound like he’s the one in danger of getting rejected.”

“Isn’t he, though? You’re not even giving him a chance.”

“I…no. That’s not…”

Sam _looks_ at him, and Dean, after a moment, glances away.

“Maybe it’s a little bit like that,” he admits quietly, and he feels Sam’s hand fall on his wrist, a comforting weight. He doesn’t look, though. If he looks, he’ll have to tell Sam to knock it off, and he just…doesn’t want to. Not just yet.

“Ask him,” Sam says. “If he says ‘no,’ well, fuck him. He’s not as good as you thought he was.”

“Look at you, getting all protective.” Dean finally glances at his wrist, and Sam quickly pulls his hand back, shrugging slightly.

“Someone’s got to do it.”

“Freaky reversal shit.”

“Yeah, God forbid that I ever become anything other than the seven year-old you remember me as.”

Dean reaches across the table, stretching up and roughly mussing Sam’s hair. Sam makes a short, disgusted sound in the back of his throat, batting ineffectually at Dean’s arm.

“All right, Sammy. I’ll ask. But if he says ‘no,’ you can’t complain about me being in a bad mood for a few days.”

“A few days? Try a few _months_. But…yeah. Fine, I get it. You gonna see him today?”

It’s Monday, the eighteenth of January, and Dean won’t see Castiel until tomorrow. A whole day. A whole day of waiting, and worrying, and trying to plan for something that can’t really be planned for. All he can do is prepare himself for Castiel to say “no” and leave it at that. There is nothing else he _can_ do. Dean swallows, thickly.

“Tomorrow,” he says. “I’ll tell him tomorrow.”

~

Tomorrow comes with a rapidity that is both alarming and terrifying.

It’s raining again. Dean had always thought that January was supposed to be the coldest month of the year, but apparently nature didn’t get the memo, because they haven’t had any snow since the beginning of December. The rain is dreary, cold and harsh, and Dean’s already sick of it. He pulls his hood up and yanks the drawstrings until he looks less like a dude and more like a Frankenstein body with a sack where the head used to be, and then braves the outside world just long enough to get to his car. Sam’s already sitting in the front seat, fiddling with his phone.

“You need to get an umbrella,” he says, idly.

“Shut up.”

Parking is hard to find in the winter months, because commuters are less inclined to walk or bike to campus, but Dean eventually finds a spot behind the student center and pulls in just as a tiny green Mazda makes a go for it. Dean only narrowly resists the urge to fist pump as Sam gets out of the Impala, slinging his backpack over his shoulder and then pulling his umbrella out of the back seat and opening it.

“You want to walk with me to Willard? I’ve got my mass media class.”

“Nah. I can hang out in the gym for a half-hour, no problem.”

Sam shrugs. “Suit yourself. Want to meet up for lunch?”

“I might see you there, but don’t wait up for me.”

“’Kay. Have fun at fencing.”

“ _Uh-huh_. Getting the shit beaten out of me by a dude twice my age. Yeah, I’m looking forward to _that_.”

Sam shakes his head, laughing, and then turns and vanishes into the pouring rain. Dean scowls up at the sky, before reluctantly climbing out of the car and shutting the door quickly, before the seats can get flooded. He tries to pull his jacket tighter around himself, hating the rain, hating the winter months, hating them for being cold and dark and wet, and for not letting him wear his leather jacket, and for just generally _sucking_.

Dean, as promised, spends a half-hour in the gym doing nothing, occasionally drifting into the health center to glare at the bowl of condoms on display in the waiting room (when you haven’t been seeing any action outside your own palm, you tend to get bitter about it), and then drifting back out again. A few students walk in about fifteen minutes before his class begins, starting up a game of basketball in the main gym, and Dean watches them for a little bit. Some of them are really good, maybe even here on scholarship. Sam has a partial scholarship, enough to cover roughly half his tuition, but the other half – and the cost of textbooks, not to mention the apartment, food, utilities, and all the necessities of life – is all on him. Well, on _them_. Sam helps, where he can, but most of their income comes from Dean’s job at Singer Salvage, and his occasional forays into the darker, seedier underbelly of their college town in order to hustle pool and con young, stupid frat boys out of their money.

Dean pushes himself away from the wall where he’d been leaning, the perfect spot to watch the basketball game, and he heads back out into the hall and towards auxiliary gym B. Other students are already drifting towards it, hauling their backpacks and their shoulder bags along, complaining softly to themselves and to each other. “The guy knock me straight on my ass the first class,” Dean hears, and he smiles to himself – one of the guys who had prior training. If nothing else, the class is definitely going to be entertaining. When _he’s_ not getting knocked on his ass, that is.

Fencing goes about as well as can be expected, considering that the last two classes he’d gone to had ended with a bruised tailbone and multiple, tiny bruises all over his chest and arms. It’s a little bit better, this time around, in that Dean manages to not get knocked over, and he leaves the auxiliary gym with a sore chest but not much else. Some of the other students are a lot worse off, nursing strained muscles and sore wrists with a mixture of complaints and exclamations of awe at Rufus’ skills as a fencer. Dean’s definitely not going to lie – the old guy is _good_.

And then it’s time for first year seminar, and Dean crosses campus, heading for the Hawthorn building with a heavy feeling in his chest that has nothing to do with the multiple tags he suffered in fencing. The rain has lessened to a drizzle, but still, by the time he gets to where he needs to be, he’s soaked almost all the way through. He needs to get a new jacket. One that _repels_ water. Scowling, Dean climbs the steps up to the building’s front door, standing underneath the awning and just…thinking, for a moment.

He’s not sure he wants to go through with this. He doesn’t want this thing he has with Castiel – if there even _is_ a thing – to end up like Lisa. Lisa, who he had pursued with mindless intensity back when he was nineteen and stupid and not thinking of anything but his own gratification, and she was twenty-one and looking for one night of nothing but distraction. Lisa, who had found him again when he was twenty-five, who had shown up on the door of his motel with a little kid in tow. Just about six years old, a little kid named Ben who had said that his mother had played Black Sabbath for him once, and he had liked it.

 _He’s not yours,_ Lisa had said, but Dean hadn’t believed her then, and he doesn’t believe her now. _But…I was wondering if you’d…_

He’d tried. He’d tried to be a good dad, to be a good boyfriend. He’d tried for a whole goddamn year. While Sam had been in college a few states over, working his ass off, Dean had been trying to make a family out of a half-remembered night the summer of his nineteenth birthday. He’d been trying to make something normal out of something fleeting, and, in the end, it hadn’t worked. He’d…snapped. He’s not dad material. He’s got a quick temper and a big mouth, and those two things combined had resulted in more late-night fights than he cares to remember. It had ended, truly and finally ended, when he finally yelled at Ben. Not just _yelled_ though – he’d heard echoes of his own father in his voice, and it had scared the shit out of him.

Sam had called him a few days after that, asking him if he wanted to move out West a little bit, to be closer, and maybe Dean would like to apply to college, just on a whim…?

Dean had packed up everything he owned that night, and he’d left in the morning.

He hasn’t heard from Lisa, or from Ben, since.

People are beginning to crowd into the Hawthorn building, the vast majority of them from Dean’s class, and Dean, after a moment, steps in out of the cold and the rain and peels his jacket off, holding it in his arms like a large, sodden cat until he can grab a desk and drape it over the back of the seat. The jacket presses wetly, uncomfortably, against his shoulders, and Dean spends a good minute trying to find a position that doesn’t leave him cold and wet, until he realizes that he’s _already_ cold and wet, and so having the jacket soaking through his shirt isn’t going to change a damn thing.

The murmur of the other students dies down as Castiel finally walks into the room.

He’s wearing a cardigan, today, a grey cardigan and a white shirt underneath it, and Dean hadn’t even known that guys could wear cardigans and not look like complete tools, yet here Castiel is, putting down his umbrella and then laying it on his desk, then stripping off his usual trench coat and draping it over the back of his chair.

“Good afternoon, class,” he says. He isn’t wearing his glasses today. Dean wonders where they went, and what Castiel needs them for. Does he use them for reading? Or does he need them all the time? There have been days where Dean has seen him doing just fine without them, but maybe he has contacts, or…

“We will be talking, today, about the library and the catalogue system. I am certain that many of you have already made use of the library, perhaps extensive use, however some of you may still be unfamiliar with it, or with the online ordering system.”

Dean listens, diligently, but pays more attention to the sound of Castiel’s voice than to the information being imparted to him. He already knows about the library, anyways. His last English class was pretty clear on how to use the online catalogue, and how to find what you wanted in the library itself. He scribbles in his notebook as he listens, drawing tiny faces, a doodle of a dog eating a hamburger, a stick figure Sam with floppy hair and disapproving eyes. Castiel’s voice is soothing, and Dean drifts into thought about how Sam would react if he told him. He’d be upset, no doubt. That whole conversation they had about relationships between teachers and students…Sam wouldn’t approve, if he knew the truth. He wouldn’t be telling Dean to give Castiel a chance. He’d be talking about how dangerous it would be, how risky, how _stupid_. And it’s all of those things, really.

But it’s all of those things _and more_.

Before he knows it, the full fifty minutes are up, and the classroom fills with the rustling sound of students standing, gathering their backpacks and putting away their laptops and notebooks. Dean is, once again, left behind; he is the only student still in the room as everyone else heads out into the hallway, talking amongst themselves.

Castiel is standing at the front of the room, carefully shaking out his coat and then slipping it over his shoulders. Dean watches the movement of Castiel’s hands, fascinated.

“Dean?”

Dean starts, and then quickly stands, nearly shoving the desk back a few inches in his enthusiasm. He winces, and then adds insult to injury when he trips over his own backpack as he attempts to reach the front desk. His hands slam down on the edge of desk, the polished wood digging sharply into his palms as he goes down onto one knee. The breath rushes out of him, and he’s struck with the sudden, terrifying thought, _Dad raised me to be better than this. He’d be ashamed._ Everything seems to pause for a minute, and then the world rushes back in on him, and Dean sucks in a deep breath, and realizes that there’s a warm hand on his shoulder.

 _You know who trips and falls? People who are unprepared. People who wouldn’t last a second in real combat. Civilians. Are you a civilian, Dean?_

 _No, sir._

“Dean? Are you all right?”

Castiel is kneeling next to him, expression concerned, and it’s his hand on Dean’s shoulder, not John Winchester’s, and it’s his knee pressing slightly against Dean’s, and his intensely blue eyes, and his mouth turned down at the corners, barely a frown at all but it somehow manages to convey more information than Dean could with a song and dance routine.

“Yeah,” Dean says vaguely. “Yeah, I’m…”

“Would you like for me to call student health services?”

“No, I’m fine. Thanks.” Dean pushes himself up, wincing at the dig of the desk’s edge into his already tender palms. Castiel rises with him, looking intense, but slightly less worried.

“If you are certain…”

“I’m sure, Castiel.”

Castiel nods slightly. “Very well. I simply…do not like to see you hurt.”

 _I don’t like to see me hurt either_ , Dean thinks, but he doesn’t say it aloud. Instead, he clears his throat and goes to brush off the knees of his jeans. His palms sting like crazy.

There are dark stains on the denim.

“Shit,” Dean says, and holds up his palms, examining them. Only one is bleeding, the other is just tender, but still, _bleeding_. Castiel makes a soft, surprised sound, and Dean glances up as long fingers wrap around his wrist, holding his hand still as Castiel examines the wound.

“I will take you to the health center,” Castiel says firmly. He’s so close – he smells like rain, and sweet grass, and the weird crackle of ozone, like a lightning storm. “If nothing else, they will have bandages for you, and antibiotic ointment. I would be…very displeased if you were to become sick, Dean.”

So close. Close enough to touch. Close enough to…kiss. Dean sways forward, and then back again, unable to make up his mind.

 _You’re not even giving him a chance._

Dean swallows, hard, and then takes a deep breath. Castiel looks steadily at him, blinking slowly, almost completely still.

“This might be a weird time to ask this,” Dean says, “but do you want to…go and get coffee, sometime?”

“I do not drink coffee.”

It feels like someone has pulled the bottom out of his chest, allowing his heart and stomach to plummet down to somewhere around his feet. “Oh.”

Castiel seems to hesitate for a moment, and then he tightens his grip around Dean’s wrist. “I do, however, know of a very nice café that has a wonderful selection of tea. If you are…not adverse to joining me for lunch.”

It’s like being on a roller coaster, all these sudden ups and downs, but Dean remembers it from Lisa…it’s just been a long time since he had to deal with it. Still, the strange, warm feeling spreading through him is…nice. Achingly familiar.

His mouth is stupidly dry, and his tongue feels thick and useless, but Dean still manages to say, “I’d love that.” Castiel smiles at him.

“Then we are agreed. We may discuss the particulars as I drive you to the health center.” There’s no room for argument in his voice, and Dean, after a moment, nods, and allows himself to be led out of the classroom, his bleeding palm cupped, blood trickling slowly down his arm, and Castiel’s hand resting between his shoulder blades, a constant and steadying warmth.


End file.
